Comprehensive Cancer CareCore Services & Clinical Team

Ryan Hospital’s Comprehensive Cancer Care Program is led by a world-class team of board-certified veterinarians who each bring a defined set of expertise and techniques for treating cancer.

We offer an integrated approach to cancer care. When you come for your initial appointment, you'll meet with a member of our core team so we can get a sense of your animal's background, history, and previous care. We can then determine both a diagnostic and treatment strategy that could involve chemotherapy, radiation therapy, surgery, or a combination of any of these modalities.

Radiation Oncology

Penn Vet’s radiation oncology staff prescribe radiation therapy to shrink or eliminate tumors. Significant technological advances allow for improved targeting of the cancer and sparing of adjacent normal tissues. Penn Vet offers patients the widest range of radiation treatment options using a linear accelerator. Radiation therapy can be used as a sole treatment modality, or in combination with surgery and/or chemotherapy to achieve control of cancer and sometimes even cure it. When this cannot be achieved, radiation can still provide significant alleviation of symptoms and improved quality of life.

Veterinary patients are anesthetized for each dose of radiation to ensure they remain still during the treatment. The patient’s electrocardiogram, blood pressure, and respiration are monitored using sophisticated equipment. A wide selection of modern anesthesia drugs accommodates each patient’s individual requirements and provides a quick recovery from anesthesia. This allows radiation to be safely administered five days a week.

Treatment is performed by a team of specialists, including a board-certified radiation oncologist and anesthesiologist, in conjunction with certified veterinary technicians and nurse-anesthetists specifically trained in radiation oncology and anesthesia.

Interventional Radiology

Penn Vet’s interventional radiology (IR) staff use fluoroscopy, an imaging technique using X-rays to obtain real-time moving images of the internal structures of a patient. Through this technique, they gain access to different tubular structures in the body such as the trachea, ureter, and arteries in order to deliver materials for diagnostic and therapeutic purposes. Interventional radiology provides viable alternatives for patients in whom conventional therapies are declined, not indicated, or associated with excessive morbidity or mortality. And the procedures — such as tumor embolization (using beads or other substances to block a tumor's blood supply) — are performed with very small incisions.

Our interventional radiologists also install subcutaneous vascular access ports (SVAPs) to reduce the time, trauma, and discomfort associated with the placement of multiple short-term catheters. Access to the circulatory system is necessary in order to ensure the patient’s safety during the multiple anesthesias required for animals undergoing radiation therapy. In many animals, there is difficulty maintaining this access throughout a course of therapy with multiple short-term catheters, because blood vessels can become scarred, collapsed, and inflamed when they are repeatedly used. SVAPs not only ensure a simple, non-stressful method to gain vascular access, but they also minimize the need to use multiple veins, thereby preserving these vessels for future use (such as for blood tests, anesthesia, fluid supplementation, or drug therapy).